Teeing off on a pile of trash

GOLF

GOLF

July 04, 2006

MUNSTER, Ind. (AP) -- A northwest Indiana golf course is being built atop an accumulation of 80 years of trash. The new golf course, part of Munster's developing Centennial Park, will be on top of a closed landfill that was first owned by the National Brick Co. in the 1920s. "There's between 30 to 50 feet of very dense clay after about 10 feet of organic material," town engineer James Mandon said. "The clay was good for making bricks. "What they did back then is they would excavate the entire area and put in brick rubble to fill in these areas. Then they'd dig out another area, fill it back in with brick and they'd keep going. ... Well, somebody got the idea while it was still privately owned back in the '40s, they could bring garbage out and put that in, too." The debris largely was construction byproducts until the 1960s when "we started throwing everything away," he said. By the early 1970s, the brickyard owners decided to close the landfill a few miles south of Hammond rather than comply with environmental regulations under the Clean Air Act and it was taken over by the town. Even then, Mandon said, the intent was to develop the landfill into a park that would include soccer fields, baseball diamonds and picnic areas. But flat land would accumulate water, which would percolate through the clay into the garbage and produce methane, Mandon said. "Because of those things, the final development plan ... was changed to build some grade and hills and so forth," he said. The Indiana Department of Environmental Management approved the landfill-golf course, whose construction began 18 months ago with the importation of 600,000 cubic yards of clean fill material, much of it bricks, concrete and other material from the demolition of buildings in nearby Chicago.